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When I went back to Wikipedia after an absense of about 3 years or so, I found that there were some remarkably intolerant and rude editors who seemed to be able to do anything with impunity. Luckily, the main editor in question has since left, but it was ridiculous.

Regrettably my depression flaired up while dealing with the issues, and I left the project (again), but this time most definitely for the very last time.

Also regrettably, the Admin's Noticeboard - which I founded - seems to be a hotbed of intrigue and oftentimes is more a hindrence to the project than a help. It's still necessary, but I suspect that it has centralized power far too much. It may have changed as it's more than a year since my last foray on the project, but that was my experience.

I hear stories like this, but have not run into it myself, with the exception of areas that are inherently contentious anywhere, such as Israel-Palestine or current elections. What kinds of areas is it in? I most often run into the opposite problem of just not enough people around. I'll ask for comments on a talk page and nobody will answer for months, if ever; and even some of the WikiProjects are ghost towns if I ask a question over there. The people who do answer are usually polite and helpful. I mostly edit in history- and geography-related areas, along with a little bit of computer science. Are those unusually polite areas?

If anything, I personally find Wikipedia-writing a bit of a relaxing break from the often-rancor-filled tone of other online activities (even HN can have an edge to it). Digging up some books from the library and using them to write a new article or two, along with adding a few citations to other articles, etc., passes a pleasant afternoon.

Well, I started editing the Logic article in 2004 and "semi-retired" in 2009 for the kind of reason you see at

http://ocham.blogspot.de/2011/02/willliam-connolley-on-exist...

And since then I've occasionally looked at the main article and seen how the text has gradually become less readable and more error-ridden over time. For instance, following collaborative research discussing about 20 sources, I changed the first sentence to 'Logic, from the Greek λογική (logiké)[1] is defined by the Penguin Encyclopedia to be "The formal systematic study of the principles of valid inference and correct reasoning".[2]' in

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Logic&oldid=3...

However, people have their own ideas about what the topic is, and so the lead sentence has become the longer, vaguer, less cogent, unsourced, and, as a recent commenter has pointed out, incoherent two sentences 'Logic (from the Greek λογική logikē)[1] refers to both the study of modes of reasoning (which are valid and which are fallacious)[2] and the use of valid reasoning. In the latter sense, logic is used in most intellectual activities, including philosophy and science, but in the first sense is studied primarily in the disciplines of philosophy, mathematics, semantics, and computer science.'

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Logic&oldid=5...

(note that this [2] supports the old sentence, not the current two sentences)

All this in an article that the Wikipedia 1.0 project counts as amongst its 100 most important.

I liked editing maths articles - it seemed to attract a nice, well-informed, and result-focussed crowd. I value Wikipedia as a resource for a range of topics, such as network protocols. I liked editing philosophy articles in 2004, but I stopped enjoying it in 2006, and stopped believing that Wikipedia was a useful resource for such topics around 2009.

Good point. General articles like "logic" are contentious, which I had forgotten as I tend to avoid them. I feel Wikipedia is not at its strongest there, since it tends to require synthesis that is almost inevitably opinionated and subjective. Most good review articles in journals are opinionated critical surveys that make novel syntheses (e.g. propose a new taxonomy), which is not really Wikipedia's role.

Though, having participated in some attempts in academia to come up with consensus summaries on subjects, I think the problem may be inherently hard rather than Wikipedia-specific. If you get 10 prominent AI researchers, from several traditions, in a room and ask them to write a 5-page general introduction to AI, there will almost certainly be sparks flying. You quickly run into the trouble (as in the logic article) of jockeying over what sub-areas deserve prominent mention, how to conceive of and define the subject, etc. And the results inevitably sound "written by committee", since the intro has to include a nod to everyone's area.

I've lately taken a more systemic view of Wikipedia coverage, where my goal is to improve Wikipedia's network of articles in an area rather than mainly the top-level overview article. So I care less about what goes in [[History of Greece]], and more about the thousands of articles (most of which don't yet exist) on historical Greek people, places, events, etc. I think that network-of-coverage aspect is one of Wikipedia's strengths as a hypertext encyclopedia, whereas the overview articles are a strength of more traditional linear-text encyclopedias like Britannica. It also feels easier to make incremental progress in that approach: I sometimes just pick up a random history book from a library shelf, and start asking what it covers that Wikipedia doesn't yet cover, then begin adding that.

>I think that network-of-coverage aspect is one of Wikipedia's strengths as a hypertext encyclopedia, whereas the overview articles are a strength of more traditional linear-text encyclopedias like Britannica.

Hypertext for the win! May the power of the web be with you :)

I've had trouble with art-related articles.

After the most recent "well, ten minutes in Google would have been easier and more constructive than several days of telling people it's not Notable" incident, the deletionist kid involved at least had the good grace to be embarrassed at their actions.

I have authored many art related articles and corrected/augmented many others, and so far aside from the usual bots that clean up and fix typos and formatting errors, I have not seen any problems with deletions.

>I think it was Clay Shirky who once said that it was a mistake to try to solve social problems with technological fixes.

Was this http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html#content what you were referring to?

It's utterly baffling to me to see them specifically call out editor gender disparity as an issue and then seriously suggest that a ui redesign will fix this.

The issue isn't the software, it's people. People being allowed to be terrible to other people. People pushing euro/american-centric, white-centric, male-centric viewpoints. People creating a feedback loop of intolerance by making the place only habitable by the intolerant.

You can't graphic design these problems away.

Those -centric are problems, but there are others too; in a great many articles people with specific interests tend to form cliques that rigidly enforce certain viewpoints, not objective consensus or broader cultural consensus, just what those users insist should be seen.

Those interest cliques are very often nothing to do with being euro-centric or male-centric.

If the site were more user-friendly, it would be easier to use for people who don't understand the initial complexities of Wikipedia. One of the contributors on that page wrote against a redesign because they don't want to have to re-learn how to use the site, insinuating that the initial learning curve was rough for someone who is an editor, not a web person.

The redesign should include better promotion for the site/make people aware of the contribution process just as much as it should focus on the content management and discussion portions.

There is some evidence (I believe from a commissioned study) that the current interface disproportionately filters out non-technical would-be editors from contributing, because of its heavy use of markup in a plaintext editing field. Stuff like:

   <ref name="citekey">{{cite book | title = ... }}</ref>

is impenetrable to some would-be editors, especially when it starts getting more complex and nested. Even as a long-time editor with a CS background, I sometimes find it hard to skim past big blocks of markup to find what I want to edit, and it's easy to screw things up and end up with unclosed ref tags and that kind of thing. To someone who doesn't even know what an "unclosed tag" is (most people), I can only imagine it'd be many times more confusing.

Since people with technical backgrounds are disproportionately male, it could be a contributing factor to the gender disparity. Hardly the only one, but a WYSIWYG editor may at least broaden the population being drawn from.

The real solution to 'deletionism' is to start your own wiki and impose your own policy. If your content is good enough for others, and licensed right, it can be copied to whatever other sites (wiki or not) want it; if it isn't, who cares? It will always be on your little wiki, available to the world.

Wikipedia has no obligation to host everything you want to put on it.

We're not talking about how difficult it is to get text onto the internet, we're talking about how Wikipedia, the community, could in our understanding benefit from certain changes.

The solution to a problem in a community isn't to go start your own community somewhere else.